Nicolas Padula

My responsibilities include defining the company’s tech strategy, and collaborating to lead forward its implementation in the following areas:

• HR:
  • Outlining the interview process as well as the technical challenges, aiming for them to be measurable, systematically reproducible and scalable at the organizational level
  • Collaborating in the career-track ccreation and the training of new personnel
  • Guaranteeing knowledge-transfer across the different areas of the organization
• Projects and Operations:
  • Defining processes, techniques and standards that can be implemented with low effort, to achieve a faster kickoff/onboarding process when launching new projects inside the organization
  • Technical and architectural support during the early phases of the projects
  • Design, evaluation and improvement of projects and procesess, both internal and external
• R&D:
  • Researching and developing prototypes and proof of concepts of novel technologies whithin the organization
  • Identifying the opportunities to apply novel tools or techniques in real, productive projects
• Sales:
  • Participating and collaborating in pre-sales meeting of highly technical content
  • Training and informing the Sales department of techniques and tools being used in the company
  • Identifying and proposing improvements to the company’s value proposition
• Communication:
  • Generating and nurturing internal and external spaces for communication and learning (talks, webinars, blog posts, etc.)

Assumed the technological leadership of a competitive intelligence SaaS product. Pioneered the implementation of a modern software development process by implementing Lean management and modern CI/CD practices. Achieved a 300% cycle time reduction, a 65% defect rate reduction and 35% reduction in cloud infrastructure costs. Improved the performance and stability of the product.

I am responsible for coordinating different teams, help teams prioritize valuable requirements, collaborating in the design and clarification of ambigouous features, outlining the long-term roadmap and mitigating possile risks that affect deadlines.

Additionally, under my leadership, we were able to improve the reliability and performance of the product, and expands the teams’ areas of influence, taking over external codebases and improving them. In these improvements, we were able to enhance the previous AI/ML capabilities of the product, not only by integrating with existing cloud-based AI solutions, but also by implementing hand-crafted improvements to our home-grown algorithms.

I collaborated on the design, development and documentation of a distributed system designed to offer secure, transparent tunnelling based on the Wireguard protocol.

My responsibilities included documenting and explaining unknown areas of the system and identifying improvement areas (both in terms of implementation and architecture)

Participated in R&D projects concerning distributed operating systems. The goal of the project was to evaluate the compatibility and potential for practical applications of different Unikernel platforms (Unikraft, UKL, Gramine, gVisor, among others). The goal was to identify platforms capable of running in a modified Linux kernel that was altered to work as a distributed hypervisor.

Led teams of 3-10 people through the development of multiple complex systems for a US-based electronic payment processing company. Architected, researched and worked on critical components while also being part of product design and requirements gathering.

Notable examples of these systems are:

• An internal, multi-source search engine based on Elasticsearch
• An internal, multi-channel notification system
• A generic, extensible comparison engine, designed with the goal of comparing and analyzing financial transactions represented by the ISO 8583 standard.

Built business-critical features for a US-based ed-tech SaaS company. Pioneered a technological modernization approach which involved applying the strangler pattern to move towards a high-quality Modular Monolith + CQRS architecture. Modernized the CI/CD pipelines to accommodate architectural changes.

I Developed a SaaS app for a health services provider company. It supported E2E medical procedure authorization, audit and billing, as well as integrations with major local health insurance providers. Developed a domain-specific rule integrity/consistency validation engine for the same customer.

I Developed several applications for supporting internal processes (HR scheduling, infrastructure control and monitoring, as well as systems designed to assist in internal QA testing) for an overseas electronic payment processing company. The solutions were integrated with the customer’s existing corporate ecosystem.

I Built several features for the MVP of a blockchain-based compliance tech startup. Provided architectural consultancy regarding semantic applications.

I Participated of the maintenance, diagnostics and debugging of an industrial circuit-breaker measurement system, which measured the response of devices through Fourier-analysis of the machines’ vibrations, obtained with an industrial-grade accelerometer. The diagnosis was done through statistical analysis of the measurements obtained with the device.

I collaborated with the documentation and diagnosis of a mainframe-based financial transaction management system.

I collaborated in the development of a diamond traceability management system.

Planned, and conducted lectures, practical lessons and other classroom activities as well as office-hours. Taught Object Oriented Programming (Smalltalk), Logic Programming (Prolog) and Functional Programming (Scheme) both from a theoretical and applied standpoint.

Collaborated in the design and planning of the development of a line-of-business system for a local agricultural company.

Collaborated in the development of management and traceability system for a local agricultural company.

Participated in R&D projects concerning semantic integration of heterogeneous data sources in a supply chain oriented context. Wrote and published several research papers. Presented papers on several conferences across the country.